We've come to this dark time in which the new Gestapo of Homeland Security lurks here, where citizens are having their rights suspended.

Art in its highest form is art that serves and instructs society and human development.

I am who I am despite what America has put before me. I am who I am despite the obstacles that we have all faced based upon race and based upon social and spiritual humiliation.

I think there's a lot that the larger society could have been taught or can be taught, but I'm not sure - given how unyielding the larger society has been - that much has been learned.

I don't know what America has really learned. We are too quick to do what's expedient on behalf of our culture of greed and hedonism. We're quite prepared to go to conditions of tyranny in order to sustain that culture, and we do it in the name of democracy, when nothing could be more undemocratic. We do it in the name of saving the values of our society, when the way we behave corrupts those values. We do it in the name of God in whom we believe, when in fact we have corrupted our own vision of the Christian journey.

Our foreign policy has made a wreck of this planet. I'm always in Africa... And when I go to these places I see American policy written on the walls of oppression everywhere.

I not only think that they (U.S. leaders) are misguided, but I think they know exactly what they are doing and I think that they are men who are possessed of evil.